By Dingding Chen
Don’t expect China to become another United States. It’s a good thing that China is just being China.
Renowned China scholar David Shambaugh published an article inThe National Interest, asking a very important question: is China a global power? His conclusion is that China is not a global power, at least not yet. His main argument is that China is still very limited in five important dimensions of global power, i.e., international diplomacy, military capabilities, cultural presence, economic power, and domestic system.
They are many good points in Shambaugh’s argument. For example, he points out that China has been rather reactive and passive in global affairs. This has been true for the last three decades, since China embarked on the “reform and opening” movement in 1978. Deng Xiaoping’s famous doctrine “Keep a low profile” has essentially become China’s grand strategy since then. At times, China’s diplomacy appears clumsy and difficult to make sense of. China is still learning how to present herself in a sophisticated way on the global stage. Shambaugh is particularly right when he says, “China does not lead. It does not shape international diplomacy, drive other nations’ policies, forge global consensus, put together coalitions or solve problems.”
However, his main argument that China is not a global power is flawed for three important reasons. First, in Shambaugh’s article the definition of global power is not always clear. Clearly Shambaugh is using the U.S. as model of global power. But the U.S. is not just a global power, it is a global hegemon in many ways. Indeed, the influence of the U.S. on other states is unprecedented in human history thus rendering it unfair to compare China or any other global power to the United States. In addition, the U.S. was lucky in some sense because World War I and World War II basically destroyed other great powers, thereby simply handing superpower status to the United States. It is impossible for China to become another U.S. for a variety of historical, cultural, and social reasons. In this sense, whether or not China is a global power must be judged upon China’s relationships with many other equal states.
Read the full story at The Diplomat